SEE ALSO

Looking Glass

(2005)

Directed by Éric Darmon
Music by Philip Glass

CAST:
Philip Glass.

SYNOPSIS:
This documentary captures the overflowing energy and activity of one today's
greatest composers, Philip Glass, and allows us to follow him from New
York to London and from Paris to Boston. He speaks about his beginnings,
his moving to Paris for two years of intensive study with Nadia Boulanger,
his meeting with Indian musician Ravi Shankar and director Robert Wilson,
who had a deep influence on his career. The film also shows him at work
on the last details of his opera The Sound of a Voice, directed by Robert
Woodruff and conducted by Alan Johnson.

Éric Darmon's camera, with its poetic shots and original framings,
takes us for a musical journey into seven months of the life of the composer
who, rising from the underground scene of the seventies, brought on a revolution
in modern theater.

NOTES:
When Philip Glass' music came to people's attention at the start of the 1970s,
it presented an alternative to everything else on offer at the time: rock
was becoming more complex and academic, with some of its most experimental
forms actually overlapping with contemporary research; vocal music was
becoming increasingly overblown, encumbered by symphony orchestras or fettered
by the metronome of the drum machine. Meanwhile, contemporary music had
turned in on itself, addressing an ever-more rarefied audience of connoisseurs
and justifying itself with abstruse, pretentious musicological texts.

With its return to a candid, cheerful beat and almost physical feeling for
sound, Music in Twelve Parts (1971/74), which was issued on a new label,
Virgin, set the tone for a new kind of modern, avant-garde music that did
not require lengthy explanations.

Glass' instant, lasting success with an ever-expanding audience not made
up exclusively of contemporary music specialists probably explains the permanent
grudge the intelligentsia of "Modern" music seem to bear him: from
underground, alternative composer, Glass became the acclaimed all-rounder
of contemporary music. Some people in both Europe and the USA have never
accepted the way Glass' music transcends the clear-cut ideological divisions
of contemporary music, taking its inspiration from a number of sources (including
French and Indian) and reconciling the popular with the academic, East with
West.

As regards this last point, Philip Glass is incontestably one of the Western
composers who has gone farthest in integrating and assimilating compositional
principles borrowed from the Indian sub-continent. He explains the difference
between Western and Indian music in the following way:"In Western music we divide time -as if you were to take a length of
time and slice it the way you slice a loaf of bread. In Indian music (and
all the non-Western music with which I'm familiar), you take small units,
or 'beats,' and string them together to make up larger time values," and
adds, "I tried to see if I could integrate the formal principles of
this music into my work. I confess I still don't think I've fully succeeded.
For my whole generation, which was dominated by serialism, this music was
a breath of fresh air. It allowed us to think of music in a different way."

The sparkling grace of these Minimalist loops -infinitely varied and each
of a different length- suggests a fundamental movement based on rhythm and
undulation, a meditation on Time as an experience of movement. As Leonardo
da Vinci put it, "Movement gives shape to all forms. Structure gives
form to all movement."

These uniquely original features of Glass' music were fully revealed in
Einstein on the Beach, a joint creation with theatre producer Robert Wilson
which was staged in Avignon and then Paris in 1976. For many of us, it came
as a revelation. This music was like nothing we knew: it was as if we suddenly
found ourselves in another world. Glass and Wilson had dreamed up a theatre
based on a series of tableaux and images in which the visual and musical
elements were of equal importance. Glass' composition echoed the sublime
stateliness of Wilson's choreography, inviting the listener to join in with
the ritual and the contemplation. This style -which was neither simplistic,
nor more elaborate than neo-serialism- suddenly made a whole swathe of contemporary
music seem outmoded.

We were witnessing the birth of a new form of artistic
expression, which was both visual and phonic and overturned notions of time
and space. It became the music of a generation which was resolutely undogmatic,
never tying itself down to one particular style, attracting new audiences
and reconciling others with contemporary music. Philip Glass has remained
faithful to his underground beginnings. Instead of sitting back and waiting
for commissions, he anticipates. Now that he produces his own records, he
is entirely free to decide what and how to create: he can form a group of
musicians, do a tour and play wherever he likes -in galleries, universities,
cinemas or remote villages, leapfrogging traditional distribution circuits
and recovering the freedom of a space entirely dedicated to his creation.

When he started out, Glass often performed in avant-garde artistic venues,
but in recent years he has organised his own tours, performing in some unexpected
places. When he travels the countryside with his marquee, with copies of
his opera La Belle et la Bête or Godfrey Reggio's "silent" movie
Koyaanisqatsi in his luggage, he is getting closer to audiences and reviving
the tradition of stage-show as popular entertainment -the "boards" on
which Stravinsky and Ramuz' Soldier's Tale and many other works of the 1920s
and 1930S French avant-garde were first performed.

Today, Glass has lost none of his impressive energy and is constantly composing
new scores of all sorts, exploring many different avenues, including "traditional" opera,
in commissioned works by the New York MET (The Voyage, 1992) and the Portuguese
government (White Raven, for the commemoration of the Portuguese Discoveries
in 1998).

With his incessant activity and sense of theatre, he has managed to avoid
the unhappy consciousness of the creative artist in search of an audience.
One of the things that makes Glass so outstanding is the way he mixes genres
-interweaving opera and instrumental music, film and incidental music, piano
and chamber music with consummate panache, even going so far as to create
a new art form in La Belle et la Bête, the staggering first example
of a "film opera", and a 3D the video opera MoNstERs of GRAce,
a joint creation with Bob Wilson first staged in 1998.
The fact that he is one of the few artists to have achieved popular success
in their own lifetime adds to his fascination.

In Looking Glass, we accompany him step by step from the private world of
creation, via the process of writing out the score and initial rehearsals
with the musicians, to recording in the studio. At home and in performance,
via the people we see him interacting with, Philip Glass rolls out the film
of his multiple lives in New York, Boston, London and Paris.

The extra Another Look consists of several previously-unreleased items,
including an eight-part interview with Glass about his childhood (when he
and his brother used to break up piles of unsold 78s in the mezzanine of
their father's shop), his teacher Nadia Boulanger, his early collaborations
with Ravi Shankar and Bob Wilson, the composers of the past he owes most
to and other composers of his own generation, and his recent work The Sound
of a Voice, a diptych of chamber operas with a libretto by David Henry Hwang,
which was produced by Robert Woodruff at the ART theatre in Boston (USA)
in May 2003.

This is followed by two whole scenes from The Sound of a Voice
filmed in Boston, and a piano rendering by Glass himself of his Opening from
Glassworks, filmed in his New York home. In an interview filmed at the Watermill
Center -the multi-disciplinary training and rehearsal centre he founded in
1992, on eastern Long Island, just outside New York- Robert Wilson talks
about his relationship with Glass and recalls the landmark shows they worked
on together (Einstein on the Beach, the CIVIL warS and White Raven).

- Franck Mallet and Éric Darmon
Paris, April 2005

ÉRIC DARMON
An ethnologist by training, Éric Darmon established the Mémoire
Magnetique production company with Director Xavier Gros in 1982. A witness
to the cultural events of our time, he writes, produces and directs many
reports and documentaries for French television (including programmes for
Ushuaïa, Thalassa and Animalia series). In Au Soleil même la nuit,
he explores the creation of a theater show (Tartuffe by Molière) made
by Ariane Mnouchkine and Théâtre du Soleil.

FRANCK MALLET
Frank Mallet is a journalist, author and radio producer who began his career
with daily newspapers Libération and Le Monde before starting to
write for specialized magazines such as Le Monde de la Musique and Les
Inrockuptibles, to which he participated as Classical Music Editor. His
career as a radio producer took him to France Musiques (where he produced
the Poissons d'Or, Le Matin des Musiciens, Intégrales shows) and
France Culture (Entre-temps, Les Chemins de la Musique). He presently works
for Classica and also collaborates with bilingual magazine Artpress since
1998.